You don’t have to be a scholarly editor to produce high-quality digital editions with your students. This discussion aims to make editorial practices and open publishing platforms more accessible to instructors who might want to incorporate this valuable and pedagogically engaging work into their courses. The technology needed to produce a digital edition is readily available, but resources describing methodologies and tools can be overwhelming and even intimidating. During our session, we will share examples of digital editions produced with Pressbooks, Ed., Hugo, TAPAS, and even Google Docs. We will also gather, from participants, accounts of the ways texts are being assigned in humanities classrooms (everything from photocopies to costly anthologies). We will introduce an exercise to evaluate the features of editions currently in use to better understand how they compare in terms of openness, editorial apparatus, and completeness. This exercise will help participants set goals for creating, adopting, or adapting digital editions for their classrooms.
This discussion will be facilitated by faculty members committed to editing with students and sharing their strategies with others. Dr. Mary Isbell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven and leads the Transforming Humanities Texts project, an initiative designed to encourage edition-building and -publishing in humanities courses. She has published editions with students for a range of audiences, from a digital common read built for incoming freshmen and published using the popular combination of Pressbooks and Hypothesis to a scholarly edition of a handwritten nineteenth-century shipboard newspaper published with Scholarly Editing. Dr. Erica Zimmer is a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her work on histories of the book ranges from the hands-on to the hypertextual. Current digital editorial projects include Browsing the Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (with The Map of Early Modern London) and a collaborative edition of Isaac Newton’s 1690s MS translation of Nicholas Flamel’s Figures hierogliphiques. Dr. Christopher Ohge lectures at the University of London, and has been developing in-person and online courses in editing and book history for the London Rare Books School since 2018. His forthcoming book Digital Editing and Experience: Inventions of the Text (Cambridge UP) offers pragmatic thinking tools for creating digital editions that are attentive to experience and experimentation.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Evaluate texts currently assigned in terms of openness, editorial apparatus, and completeness
- Find resources to support the creation of a digital edition for use in the classroom
